The Elizabethan adventurers Thomas Eliot, Sir Walter Ralegh and Edmund Spenser travelled overseas to meet cultures different from themselves. The acknowledgement of these cultures that are ‘other’ to the dominant Elizabethan civilization are what John Gillies terms the exotic, wondrous, strange and barbaric (Gillies 25). However, I am arguing that the Elizabethan notion of individuality is challenged, because they identify an exotic or a more pleasing variation of themselves in the people they label as their inferiors.

Early Modern Exchanges
The official blog of Early Modern Exchanges that studies the diverse cultural, historical, economic and social exchanges between England and Europe, European countries, the Old World and the New in the period 1450-1800.